Based on interviews with 600 people in the Mexican state of Jalisco, the idea is to find out what brings people who lived in the U.S. back to their home country, and help determine what can be done to help them, said MATT executive director Aracely Garcia-Granados.

“We only know half the story,” Garcia-Granados said. “We know whey they came to the United States, but we don’t know why they returned to Mexico.”

While there has historically been a back-and-forth migration between the U.S. and Mexico, the Pew Hispanic Center reported last year that from 2005 to 2010 for the first time in decades, more people returned to Mexico from the U.S. than came here from Mexico.

The Pew study did not delve deeply into what factors were driving immigrants and their U.S. citizen children back to Mexico.

Garcia-Granados said MATT is working on programs to pair returning migrants with jobs in Mexico.